Secret of No Stress

Picture this – you are old enough to drive a car, and to shop on your own but you don’t know how to go home - because you don’t have a GPS. You did wrote down the directionsbut you can’t read your own handwriting. You had to go somewhere else but you don’t know how to get there and you don’t have any written directions for that one either. And here I thought that the moment you turn 18 you have everything figured out. In the eyes of most people you are an adult, right? Wrong!!! Let me tell ya – it does not matter how old you are – learning how to do things comes from observation and practise. You have 10 year olds who are more organized than 35 year olds who are gainfully employed and have kids, a car and a house.

So what is the key ot no stress? Organization, of course. And Iwas the queen of organized chaos – had piles of everything everywhere – but I knew where everything was. But that definitely did not help when other people needed to find it. So what made me change my mind? When I realized that I was dispensable and your reputation depended on how quickly other people can understand what you were trying to accomplish. Signs of a genius is in being able to explain the most complex of concepts in an extremely easy way so that anyone can understand it. You don’t have to be a genius to be organized but that’s for another post.

The secret is not just in being organized and being able to find your stuff,but also being able to use that stuff to solve problems in the quickest possible time forany situation that may come up or anticipate how another person would react and cater for it accordingly. So how does one learn to do that? Pay attention. Look around you. See how other people get things done (there is actually a workshop on Get Things Done). And you might get it wrong a couple times and then you learn.

But then there are some who never get it. And you wonder why people have so much stress in their lives.